How virtual reality can change your world

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Как виртуальная реальность может изменить ваш мир

The phrase “virtual reality” appeared in the household lexicon in the 1980-ies. But the idea of creating a headset that would be able to fool the person wearing it and make him think that he is somewhere in another place, arose in the 1960-ies, and on the roof of the building in Texas was held in the ball game.

Scientist in the field of computer science Ivan Sutherland (Ivan Sutherland) was on a business trip to Fort worth, Texas, in the company Bell Helicopter manufactures helicopters and vertibirds. The company has worked to create a device that would help military helicopters to land at night. It was the helmet that allow the pilot to point the camera at the base of the helicopter and to shoot infrared images, which simultaneously appeared on the tiny screens in front of him.

Specialists Bell Helicopter conducted the test device and asked one of the employees sit in the office, to wear a prototype of the helmet and watch as two of his colleagues play the ball up on the roof of the building. When a player suddenly threw a ball into the chamber, the test pilot, who was sitting in the office, instinctively dodged the “udar”. “It was clear that the pilot thought that is behind the camera, and sitting inside the building, feels safe, said recently of Sutherland, looking back on this case. — My small contribution to the creation of virtual reality was that I realized that the camera we don’t need, instead we use a computer”.

In 1965, Sutherland wrote the article, which stated that “image” would ever be so plausible that they can “literally be the Wonderland into which Alice fell”. This idea of creating the best alternatives teleportation machine that would allow people to move and be in any place and to conjure up any dream — is still the basis of all modern developments in the field of virtual reality. Working first at Harvard and then at the University of Utah, Sutherland has created his own VR helmet is so heavy that it had to be attached to the ceiling with the help of a small crane. Using stereoscopic glasses, the first subject showed a three-dimensional reproduction of a small cube floating in front of them.

“When I started working on the display that it was necessary to wear on the head, I had no idea how it would be difficult,” wrote Sutherland in 1968.

Didn’t know it and the scientists who followed in his footsteps. For several decades, due to technical errors and failed the commencement of works the development of VR-technology was too slow. But now — thanks to advances in the field of miniaturization of computers and three — dimensional graphics- VR-device can approach the level of visual perception. Several VR devices have appeared on sale or will hit the market this year. In some of them — such as goggles Google Cardboard in a cardboard frame (available at a price of about $ 20) the minimal number of devices — basically two plastic lenses and a smartphone. More complex glasses Oculus Rift (worth $ 599) is equipped with additional sensors to track head position and high resolution screens. But still there are problems: if you use BP devices for too long, there may be nausea, and even smartphone screens — “retina displays” with a very high resolution may appear grainy or pixelated.

Now that the VR device come to mass market, the main thing is that we want these devices to do. As well as books and papers appeared after the invention of the printing press, said Sutherland at the last ceremony of delivery of prizes to the developers of VR technologies Proto Awards, “these great creative people have made VR technology is real, filled with their content”. Here the people creating these technologies, investing in them means studying them and offer their best thoughts and ideas about how virtual reality will change the ways of learning, games, communication and visual perception”.

1. Training

How to teach people so they can feel what it means to be a victim of racial discrimination or racial insults? Instead of forcing them to sit in a lecture on this topic, and soon you will be able to give them the helmets, through which they experience that experience in virtual reality. Looking in the virtual mirror, the user sees someone like themselves — for example, a white male of middle age. But when he turns away for a moment, the reflection — or avatar — will become young colored woman. At the same time in another part of the virtual room the man will be attacked with racial insults.

“Moving for four minutes, you start to feel that you — the Director of the laboratory of the virtual human interaction Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University Jeremy Bailenson, who developed a method of “mirror” as a means of gaining experience compassion and understanding of others. “Try on another person’s body, you can relive the trauma and to overcome prejudices”.

With this project you can transform the process of learning the skills necessary in terms of social and ethno-cultural diversity. Tools of virtual reality allow the person to simulate “turning the body” in avatars of a different ethnicity or a different gender. Another program-the simulator, developed at Stanford that allows you to put people in the shoes of someone who lost his job and home, sleeping in the car or forced to live on the street.

Studies of Beilinson showed that in the development of the skills of compassion and understanding other people’s BP is much more effective than other types of role-playing games — at least in the short term. Similar techniques can be used in the treatment of people with physical disabilities or post traumatic stress syndrome.

According to Bailenson, this technique as a means of learning preferred in four main situations: when training people in a real environment is too costly, is associated with danger, is not effective and is simply impossible. For example, training fire ways to navigate and move around in a burning building may be too dangerous in real conditions, but these skills can be trained in a safe environment of virtual reality.

On the basis of some of the developments of the laboratory have managed to create a sports startup STRIVR, which helps playmaker in College football to work out a strategy without the involvement of all the team players. According to a study conducted in 2008 by Bailenson and other scientists in sport training in virtual reality can be 25% more efficient than when viewing the videos.

Meanwhile, Google is exploring the possibility of using virtual reality in school. With the app, Expeditions app for Google Cardboard glasses, students can do a virtual tour to the Great barrier reef under the leadership of Sir David Attenborough, at the ruins of Machu Picchu, Buckingham Palace and even to Mars. Moreover, all pictures taken with a panoramic camera equipped with a lens, the angle of which is 360. Since then, as last year the app Expeditions appeared on the market, they have used more than half a million students from thousands of schools in the world. And now Google offers virtual tours to more than 150 different places of the planet.

The teacher can direct the attention of students, managing a virtual tour using the tablet connected to all smartphones. For many smiling faces on the screen of the tablet (it faces the students-members of excursion groups) the teacher can understand who looks in the right direction.

“Although nothing can replace a real shaking on the school bus and these trips to different places, we are really excited to be able to recreate the world in the four walls of the classroom, says the head of the educational program Google for Education Jen Holland. — Students have the opportunity to see something in a completely different light than if they read the manual or watched the video. They are forced to join this”.

Holland acknowledges that the studies showing that VR can thus improve the quality of education has not yet been conducted. But she sees encouraging signs: “This is not only exciting — students feel that learn the material much better because it seems to them that they were there”.

2. Game

You’re sitting alone in a half-empty dusty room; smoke just extinguished cigarette. The battery in your flashlight sits, and you can only review pasted on a wall of newspaper clippings with the announcement of a missing girl. As soon as you start wondering why in one corner stands an empty chair, the only door suddenly slams shut. Holding a blinking flashlight, you turn and see that the chair had somehow turned over. And then begins to play the music box…

In the game Chair in a Room (the Chair in the room) and the plot moves as if taken from a horror movie, may seem izbirami. But the game — even despite the simple graphics, and even if you can play it using a simple cardboard glasses Google Cardboard — horrifies and tickles the nerves up to the moment when we find out who turned the chair over. Very few people manage to finish the game quietly, and not springing from his (real) chair.

“BP is different from other tools that invades your personal space, says game developer from London Ryan Bousfield. She literally closer. With all within your personal boundaries becomes either creepier or more sensible…. With horror generally it is excellent.”

Many expect that fundamentally new application for VR systems will become video games, because players crave the sensations even more immersive — and more frightening. According to analysts of the Bank Goldman Sachs of game will be most profitable software component for the VR-systems and by 2025 will result in an annual profit of 11.6 billion dollars. Along with Oculus, owned by Facebook, these firms develop games, like Sony PlayStation and Valve are planning this year to release its own headset at a cost of about a few hundred dollars.

Bousfield working on an updated version of A Chair in a Room that is adapted for Vive headset, which the game developer Valve is releasing together with the firm HTC makes smartphones. During the trial runs of the game some players had a hold over points for safety’s sake.

“It is their grounding to the real world. If they want to leave the game, they can simply remove your glasses, says Ryan. If people feel more comfortable, they will not hold the headset and are immersed in virtual reality”.

Although the graphics still looks like on game consoles, not in real life, so headset controls your visual — and auditory — perception that you inadvertently cast doubt and start to believe.

Playing in London Heist (Robbery in London) is a game created for the VR headset to the PlayStation, which is expected to release the Sony, players will be forced to hide from the bullets and frantically fumbling through his drawers in search of the gun in order to survive in a shootout with gangsters. The creators of the game realized that I was able to find something of such things, when I saw that at the end of the scene the players are constantly trying to put their smartphones on the table — forgetting that the events only happen in the virtual world.

“We want to make people forget that they are in virtual reality, says Dave Reynard, who until this month headed the London Studio of Sony, and then left to develop their own VR systems. — This reality is not necessarily realistic, but it must be plausible”.

3. Communication

In 2014 Facebook acquired Oculus, the founder of this social network mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that his grandiose plans for the XB are not limited to creating games, and virtual reality he called “the new social and communication platform”.

“Virtual ping pong is my most crazy experience with the Oculus lately, said Zuckerberg at a recent conference by Oculus. — It feels like you are playing with your friend next to you, but it may be at the other end of the world”.

In the demo Toybox company Oculus with motion controllers (like the Wii console, developed by Nintendo) the two players can communicate in virtual reality in the process of folding the virtual blocks, throw a ball back and forth, and even change the force of gravity. And although each player is represented by a gray face and hands, deprived of the body, the feeling of simultaneous presence in the room creates a sense of intimacy that neither Skype nor Apple technology FaceTime can’t.

The idea that virtual reality may become the means of communication may seem unrelated to the technology, which completely isolates the user from the people around them, closing their eyes and ears to replace a real world digital. But already begin to appear social VR applications that provide the possibility of communication — from video conferencing and virtual tourism to Dating and Dating.

Social app Social app Alpha, developed by Oculus, is the first platform of this appointment, presents to the public, gathers a small group of users in a virtual cinema for watching online videos like the ones uploaded on YouTube. Friends, living in different cities and even countries, can sit down and watch sports or a movie, communicating with each other using the microphone and headphones of their smartphones. Users choose a simple mask — like, mustachioed cowboy, good-natured bear, a robot with a square head — which turn your real head and nodding, chatting with other avatars. But given that the expression of these individuals users cannot be seen, communication is obtained exclusively speech.

Some companies developing more traditional means of remote presence and control, are already trying to use VR to provide a link between the digital and real worlds. Innovation lab of Cisco, develops and sells network equipment, conducted an experiment by providing one of its employees of the VR headset that is associated with the head of a robot in another country. When an employee with a headset remotely involved in the meeting, the robot is in the hall, where the meeting — sits, hears and moves synchronously with the employee. “Such a simple gesture, like Kiwanis, the robot becomes almost human,” commented David Rickman from Cisco, who helped to create a prototype.

In his novel “Lavina” (Snow Crash), published in 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagined how people spend a significant portion of their time on virtual Central online street Metaverse. Today Stevenson — “chief futurist” of Magic Leap startup operating in “mixed reality”, believes that thanks to this VR-headset today’s technology one day will look like “children’s neuralgia.”

“Characteristic today for all of us the habit of removing from his pocket the phone and browse private short message is an antisocial habit, and all her complaining and her sin, he says. Is the inevitable result of the availability of the device with a display that you can hold in your hand, and which at some point may see only one person. It may happen that this is our time people will look back upon as the mini ice age of social interaction”.

4. Visual perception

Virtual reality in the best of its manifestation may take the viewer someplace where he under other circumstances would never be able — or did not want to be. Filmed with the support of the UN documentary “Clouds over Sidrei” (from Clouds over Sidra) brings the viewer inside the refugee camp Zaatari in Jordan where 12-year-old Syrian refugee Cider tells his story. She shows us her small room in which she last year and a half, lives with his parents and three brothers, his class in a tent and the local bakery.

The film, shot with a special 3D camera, equipped with a lens with a viewing angle of 360º, allows visitors to explore the camp, track — top and bottom — the boys play football, or to look into a makeshift gym. But to take my eyes of course. The culmination of an eight-minute film was the scene when a group of refugee children huddled around the viewer.

Thanks to its staggering truthfulness the film received an award at last year’s international documentary film festival in Sheffield, and the jury called his work, “with enormous potential to change the real world”. According to the organizers of the show, the key target audience of the film, shot by enthusiasts working under the aegis of the UN, was more than able to become a donor is exceptionally wealthy and influential. Chris milk, one of the creators of the film and the project Manager Vrse (one of the first studios that started to develop a VR-system), called virtual reality “tool of formation of skills of empathy.”
“This is really a new tool, he says. — If you compare it with the cinema or radio, or TV, by all means, now we have the technology, through which is born a new format, a new language of storytelling”.

Milka admire the idea, to allow the audience to “enter the screen”, to establish a closer relationship with the characters of the film, because there is nothing to divide, and no distance between them.

But the rejection of conventional frame synchronization characteristic of traditional cinema, poses with the founders of BP-films new problems. I wish people could look in different directions, they would not be able to understand the basic idea of the plot. Directors shooting films using VR-techniques, only beginning to discover methods that enable you to direct the viewer’s attention through movement or sound. One solution could be the acceptance when the rotation of the head of the viewer in the right direction starts a dialogue or enter specific storyline.

“As for effects like “wow, I like a roller coaster” — so there was plenty, says milk. — In fact necessary — as always, when it comes to serious information environment to master the means of narration. How to keep a story in virtual reality? The question I ask myself a hundred times a day.”

One way to solve the problem of the story — just show the events in real time. The sport is proof that it’s interesting. California startup NextVR last year was broadcast through your app match of the National basketball League users virtual helmets Gear VR developed by Samsung. The audience “got” the place in the first row, which usually costs a few thousand dollars. The company recently entered into an agreement with Fox Sports for a period of five years.

“Really the impression that you’re sitting there,” said the Executive Director of the company NextVR brad Allen at the conference Goldman Sachs, held recently in San Francisco.

“People like it when you tell something, but they still love to interact, to communicate,” says Neil Stevenson from Magic Leap, and “to have the opportunity to combine all this in right proportions at the right time is very interesting”.

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